The Surrealism of Skin: Photorealistic Pencil Drawings by Ileana Hunter

Ileana Hunter’s passion is drawing portraits of famous faces in a highly realistic style. She uses a variety of different pencils to create her drawings, ranging from hard pencils that create a light tone to soft lead pencils that creates rich, dark tones. The majority of Hunter’s models are female, including actresses like Scarlett Johansson and deceased singer Amy Winehouse. Using a photograph as reference, Hunter sketches and then shades her drawings, carefully copying the highlights, gradients and shadows of the photograph to create photorealistic drawings. “Photorealistic” means drawing or painting a picture that looks like a photograph but isn’t. It is a style that is tricky to achieve as it requires a lot of time and patience and doesn’t allow the artist to use expressive brushstrokes or pencil lines in the art work.

Like many artists, Ileana Hunter is fascinated by human eyes and has created several photorealistic drawings that explore the minute details of the skin, eyelashes and irises that make up the human eye. In many of her realistic drawings of eyes, the reflection in the model’s eye tells a story of its own. In one pencil drawing, there is a silhouette of a human being looking into the eye, which gives the viewer the impression that it is themselves caught in reflection.

Ileana Hunter’s art is classified as both fine art and fan art. It is fine art because her medium is pencil on paper, which is considered a fine art medium. Her subjects are celebrity singers and actors, and so her photorealistic drawings fall into the realm of fine art. Hunter’s photorealistic drawings are finished with a high level of quality. The artist pays attention to detail while still creating gradients that appear almost too smooth to be real, giving her portraits a surreal beauty. Visit Ileana Hunter’s online art gallery for more photorealistic fan art pencil drawings.

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